It's raining. Now it finally feels like Seattle.

David McNamee has some more conference-going tips. I think we're supplying a pen, though. Gotta check on that one.

"Uncle." Don Box has more traffic than I do (according to an email from Paul this morning). Mom, where are you when I needed you to click on a link to Paul Vick's site?

That's OK, I never wanted a large audience. Just an influential one. Did the Washington Post call Don up to talk about Steve Ballmer? ;-)

A friend points out that the ENTJ's inside Microsoft are probably self-selecting as webloggers. He said "it's like saying all the people I talk to always seem to speak English...this probably means everybody is speaking English." Hmm, maybe they should test for ENTJ and then give us press and legal training before we should be allowed to weblog. Heh.

Nice ending to story -- P2P group: we'll pay girl's RIAA bill.

It's interesting to look back at your weblog on historical dates. On 9/11 two years ago I posted a couple of pictures from my son Patrick. Wow how has life changed in just those short two years for me. Car wreck. Divorce. Move. Ship Radio. Grandma died. Lay myself off from UserLand. Get job at NEC. Engagement to Maryam. Wedding. Move. Get job at Microsoft. Move. Whew.

"This is a day I will never forget," my son Patrick said two years ago today. Tell me about it. We all have fit a whole lot of life into two very short years.

Tablet PC users who want to use ActiveWords: I've been playing for the past couple of days with the beta of the Tablet PC version of ActiveWords. Works great! Man this saves trying to ink in long URLs and such.

O'Reilly's Derrick Story: "Top Ten Tips for Mac Conference Goers."

I should do something like that for PDC. Here's some off the top of my head:

1) Dress in layers (bring a sweater or light jacket). Rooms in conference centers often change in temperature. Especially after lunch. Did you know a human being gives off 90BTUs in heat? So, if everyone goes off to lunch, the rooms often get cold.

2) Bring comfortable shoes.

3) Bring computer with wireless card and a power strip.

4) Don't worry about bringing snacks. I hear there's plenty of food and snacks that we'll have out.

5) Making a partition so you can load test software sounds like a great idea.

Any others?

I'll have more PDC-specific ones closer to the event. One thing I already know is that the schedule is packed from morning to night already, so getting some sleep will be hard.

Zhanbo Sun talks about blogging from his Longhorn machine. I agree, but want to set expections properly. The Longhorn I'm playing with (and that we're expecting to hand out at PDC) is very early. Emphasis on early. The upside of having such early access is that you can actually give us feedback on what you like and hate. The downside is, this isn't ready for prime-time work (although I'm using it more and more). We'll have to talk more about this at the PDC.

Slashdot: September 9 was the birthday of the first computer bug. No, it wasn't invented by Microsoft.

Which will be better, GNOME Storage or Longhorn's WinFS?

Carl Franklin has a new .NET Rocks audio show up. The VB.NET team is interviewed.

ADTmag: Developers to get first look at Longhorn.

Steven Levy in MSNBC, talking about role of computers and education in Geek Bill of Rights.

Tablet PC users, check out the on-screen keyboard.

Feedster is a search engine for RSS feeds. But, I was just over at Gadgetopia and see that I can now search Feedster from my MSN Messenger. This is awesome!

Scott Johnson, the guy who wrote Feedster, is doing 30 Feedster features in 30 days.

Maybe I should do something like that for Longhorn. Problem is, there's probably more than 1000 new Longhorn features. How about "the 1000 days of Longhorn?"

Jeff Veen says that everyone will soon watch this badgers and mushrooms Flash movie. Where do people get the time to do these things?

Slashdot: Gnome 2.4 to be released.

Paolo blogs about BloggerCon. I wish I could go too, but Microsoft has its own little conference in October. You might have heard about it. Check out how many bloggers are coming to our little conference!

Zeepe 7 was released today. They say it's no longer necessary to deploy "a browser on every desktop" for your Windows users to work with web applications if you use Zeepe. Gotta check it out and they'll be at the PDC.

The Register: Camera phones tempt European handset buyers.

I bet that sales are similarly up in United States. Microsoft, where's the camera smart phone?

InfoWorld: Linux nears Windows XP usability.